SF-TH Inc Race and Sexuality in Nalo Hopkinson's Oeuvre; or, Queer Afrofuturism Author(s): Amandine H. Faucheux Source: Science Fiction Studies , Vol. 44, No. 3 (November 2017), pp. 563-580 Published by: SF-TH Inc Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5621/sciefictstud.44.3.0563 JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms SF-TH Inc is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Science Fiction Studies This content downloaded from 158.121.247.60 on Mon, 11 May 2020 17:06:56 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms NALO HOPKINSON’S QUEER AFROFUTURISM 563 Amandine H. Faucheux Race and Sexuality in Nalo Hopkinson’s Oeuvre; or, Queer Afrofuturism The recent nomination of Chuck Tingle’s Space Raptor Butt Invasion (2015) for the Hugo Award for best novel by the Sad/Rabid Puppies is an attempt to attack the credibility of the prestigious awards, and it reveals quite a lot about the now years-long right-wing backlash in speculative communities.1 The Puppies and their supporters are not only protesting the emergence and recognition of writers of color, but are also attempting to ridicule the preeminence of queer and feminist science fiction, both of which they see as a conspiracy, if we are to believe Vox Day’s most recent book-essay Social Justice Warriors Always Lie: Taking Down the Thought Police (2015). If nothing else, this reactionary backlash indicates a shift in the audience and market for speculative genres. Fan communities increasingly consume and vote for texts whose protagonists are non-white, queer, women, disabled, engaged in non-monogamous relationships, and so on. The popularity of the Star Wars franchise’s new trio of characters, Rey, Finn, and Poe (a white woman, a black man, and a racially-ambiguous, potentially queer man), for example, seems to show that even Hollywood’s multi-billion-dollar science-fiction franchises are adapting to a new market of socially-conscious, if not mainstream-feminist, consumers. In this context, intersectional critiques of speculative fictions are particularly relevant. A new generation of black women writers such as Nalo Hopkinson, Nisi Shawl, Nnedi Okorafor, Tananarive Due, and N.K. Jemisin, among others, are particularly recognized for the ways in which they challenge and transform the tropes, characters, and conventions of speculative genres, notably by featuring women of color as protagonists and by introducing more diverse characters.2 Nalo Hopkinson, a queer Caribbean-Canadian writer currently living in the US, is what Jillana Enteen calls an “Afrofuturist visionary” (263), an author whose work profoundly challenges imperialist conceptions of modernity and primitivism, technology and folklore, science and magic, the sacred and sexual, and masculine and feminine. In this essay, I argue for an intersectional approach to Afrofuturism that examines the complex and intricate relationships between race and sexuality, looking specifically into the works of Nalo Hopkinson as an exemplar of a feminist, queer-centered Afrofuturism. To this end I use black queer theory and in particular the work of Rodrick Ferguson and Matt Richardson as a theoretical framework through which to understand the complex intersectionality of Hopkinson’s queer afrofuturist texts. In the first part, I discuss the similarities of Afrofuturism and black queer theory, and the productive potentials of examining race and queerness in speculative contexts. In the second part, I analyze Hopkinson’s This content downloaded from 158.121.247.60 on Mon, 11 May 2020 17:06:56 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 564 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 44 (2017) novels The Chaos (2012), The Salt Roads (2003), and her short story “A Habit of Waste” (2001). In “Black to the Future” (1993), Mark Dery defines Afrofuturism as “speculative fiction that treats African-American themes and addresses African- American concerns in the context of twentieth-century technoculture—and, more generally African-American signification that appropriates images of technology and a prosthetically enhanced future” (180). Since then, an increasing body of Afrofuturist scholarship has emerged and expanded upon Dery’s coinage of the term, particularly in terms of genre spectrum and even medium, as scholars continue to study Afrofuturism from a musical perspective.3 Given that Afrofuturism profoundly challenges ideas about science, technology, and knowledge, many afrofuturist texts do not fit neatly into the conventions of science fiction and actually borrow from other speculative genres such as fantasy, magical realism, horror, and so on.4 In a recent essay, Julia Hoydis argues that the literary tradition of black female writers of speculative fiction that started with Octavia Butler produces a “hybridization of genres.” Hoydis claims that women in Afrofuturism especially are “more concerned with speculation and disturbing notions of reality than with scientific-technological ideas and ... they often maintain a concern with history despite a distinctly futurist orientation” (71). Certainly, Hopkinson’s work does not escape such definitions; as Rob Latham puts it: [c]ritics have been hard-pressed to come up with an adequate critical vocabulary to describe the complex genre-crossing involved in [Hopkinson’s] work. Is she producing variants of magic realism? Adaptations of the folk tale to technocultural realities? Futuristic fables? The short answer is that she is doing all of these things, and more. (338) In addition, as Hoydis aptly remarks, “a Hopkinson novel ... [typically] features characters of all ethnicities, ages, genders, and sexual orientations” (81). In his definition of the movement in the Oxford Companion to Science Fiction, De Witt Douglas Kilgore writes that “Afrofuturism can be seen as less a marker of black authenticity and more a cultural force, an episteme that betokens a shift in our largely unthought assumptions about what histories matter and how they may serve as a precondition for any future we may imagine” (8). Kilgore’s definition is particularly probing because it underlines the afrofuturist project of contesting the idea of linear time and subsequently subverting the primitivism/modernity binary. Recent works by Isiah Lavender III and Lisa Yaszek re-examine nineteenth-century novels as afrofuturist5; other scholars such as Yatasha L. Womack and Kodwo Eshun argue that the Afrodiaspora was a science-fictional experience.6 Lonny Avi Brooks suggests such retroactive analysis when he writes that “Afrofuturism as a basic framework suggests promising directions for reinvigorating our language to speak about racial identity in the deep past and the long-term future” (153). Afrofuturist texts subvert images of a post-racial future in which technology and modernism have allowed white people to survive and racialized others to This content downloaded from 158.121.247.60 on Mon, 11 May 2020 17:06:56 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms NALO HOPKINSON’S QUEER AFROFUTURISM 565 fade away.7 But they also reclaim historical narratives, particularly traumatic histories such as the African diaspora and US slavery, and play with time and time travel in ways that do not allow for a simple conception of time as linear. Considering the engagement of afrofuturist texts with histories of racism, slavery, colonialization, and systemic oppression, as well as the position of racialized bodies in stories set in the future, it is crucial to analyze the conjunction of race, gender, and sexuality. In her recent essay “Black Girls Are from the Future: Afrofuturist Feminism in Octavia E. Butler’s Fledging,” Susana Morris argues that Afrofuturism and black feminism share similar preoccupations with resistance to systemic oppression and erasure, so much so that they are “symbiotic” (153). She defines “Afrofuturist feminism” as “a literary tradition in which people of African descent and transgressive, feminist practices born of or from across the Afrodiaspora are key to a progressive future.” She writes further that Afrofuturist feminism “offers a critical epistemology that illuminates the working of black speculative fiction in vital ways” (153).8 Morris applies her theory to the works of Octavia Butler, whom she sees as a prime example of an author whose fiction is both Afrofuturist and profoundly engaged with the concerns at stake in black feminism, namely race, gender, sexuality, and ability (154-55). In an extension of Morris’s insight, I argue that black queer theory can be usefully applied to Afrofuturism because the black American historical context always already implicates sexuality, often a sexuality deemed abnormal. Like black feminism, black queer theory sheds critical insight on the racialization process that starts with the sexed and sexual body. Moreover, black queer theory, as the work of Ferguson and Richardson shows, is in part an historical project, an effort meant to have repercussions on the present and the future of black sexuality in the US. As such, it shares the afrofuturist objective to subvert linear historical narratives that produce various forms of violence against racialized and/or queer bodies. At the intersection of black queer theory and Afrofuturism lies queer Afrofuturism, a term meant to designate those afrofuturist texts in which race is inextricably tied to gender and sexuality in such a way that it is impossible to talk about one without always already signifying the other. Queer Afrofuturism is not only a useful theoretical concept through which to examine the works of black queer writers such as Nalo Hopkinson; it also illuminates the functions of racial and sexual metaphors in speculative contexts in general.